Disclaimer: Joss is Boss and I am unemployed.
A/N: Have been working on this story for forever. So long in fact, that forgot about it at one point and rediscovered it. This was/is supposed to be a sequel to Vehemence but can work as a one shot because all you really need to know is that there was a job gone wrong and people were hurt. Anyway, River PoV, Post-BDM, Jiver (or Rayne as its more commonly known). Read, enjoy, let me know what you think.
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The world tips beneath her feet.
The room expands, her vision spreading out into dark muddled corners, spots that swim in lazy patterns across her eyes. The panels shift and recede under the bare soles of her feet, and she shuts her eyes against the sight of it, waits until the room straightens itself out again.
It takes time, intervals of seconds and minutes that do not seem to lessen with the passing days, but she feels it, feels Serenity return to it proper form beneath her. She feels the cold grating of the catwalk where it bites into the balls of her feet, feels the pathway narrow until her road is once more straight and set.
She walks. One foot in front of the other, she is careful so as to keep the world in balance.
She does not care for addled axles.
His shirt falls to her knees in place of her nightgown, exposing the blues and greens and purples that bloom in haphazard patters across the expanse of her legs to the chilled air, but she doesn't mind the cold. It keeps her head cool, offsets the heat that seems to radiate from her skin, pulsing warmth that begins just north of her elbow, west of her shoulder, buried beneath layers and layers of smoothers and bandages. Makes her skin itch, the collection of heat and drugs and cotton. By contrast his shirt is a comfort, lived in and soft, smelling of the standard cleaning detergent they all wash their clothes with and the indefinable scent of Jayne.
Comfort.
The cargo bay is endless at this careful pace, each footstep adding another spent lifetime. Annoyance and impatience well inside her, bubbling and stirring with the weariness of her bones, the ache in her muscles. The door way that lead back into the passengers' common room looms at the distance and River fears another million lifetimes will have come and passed before she crosses it.
Her breathing is quick even at this snail pace, and she bites the inside of her cheek with impatience. She is a prodigy, she is a weapon of grace and endurance, and she will not allow herself to fail in this task. Her lungs burn as she draws a deep breath, and her legs wobble as she hurries them in their fall.
The threshold is solid beneath her hands and her fingers curl, tighten into impossibly white joints and angles as the world retreats and darkness spins in an odd mirage of color. Her chest hurts with each intake of stale air and her wound throbs in time with the turning of the world, the heat spreading along her arm and face and neck.
"Steady there Girl, almost done."
The floor smoothes out beneath her and the bulkhead is cool where her forehead rest against it while the world settles itself into place. Allows her the time to gather her breath, breathe in dust mites and bits of Serenity so they will rest in her lungs, and grow inside the girl where nothing else will.
She breathes and her vision flees, leaves her in the dark with the taste of copper on her tongue, lets her mind wander the corridors she travels so carefully now, hears the whispers that come from the shuttle over her head as Daddy half mumbles his concerns to the third woman in his life. She smells soap and engine grease, feels Simon's hand on her back while Kaylee's tears fill her throat. Through a haze she can make out the beating light that rest in Zoë's belly. Further still, she can make out the sound of a voice, slow and even, like the preacher's on Sunday mornings when he read from his tome. The voice picks up, crashes and spreads like a smile, and she thinks the dinosaurs are having a midnight chat with their owner.
And as suddenly as Serenity floods her, she retreats, leaving River lightheaded and winded. Her head feels empty.
Walking is a chore afterward, her limbs stiff, the world falling apart with each step she takes towards the soft glowing blue of the infirmary. The give of the passengers' common room floor is uneven and she balls her fist to keep her balance. The walls are too far now and her footing is unsteady and Serenity dips into curtseys beneath her.
The lights sting her eyes, bright and blue, garish after so long a stay in the ship's shadows. The cool linoleum beneath her feet bites at the arch of her foot.
The machines beep and blink in their self-led orchestra and when she sways; it is half to their music, half to the dizziness that sweeps her.
Her shoulder aches worst in this room, mostly from memory, and she bites her lips against the feeling of steel digging deep inside her—like blue hands, she thinks with a shudder—the scent of gunpowder in her nose and in her hair and in her wounds. Gunpowder and smoke and blood, crimson leaks sprung from fragile flesh.
Scarlet rapids let loose by her hands, her steel—her head spins, heart like a wild thing kept caged in a fairy girl's bones. 'Her body is disproportionate to her soul, her soul to her mind', River thinks with a sighShe is tired of being a weapon.
By comparison—or perhaps in undeniable reality—his heart beat is shallow beneath her fingertips, like the echoing after thought of a bang. Still it shoots up her good arm with the force of a drumbeat, shaking her bones, setting her heartbeat to a new tempo.
His body is broken, laid out and dressed in tubes and stitches. The sight of it makes her own wounds ache all the worse.
Simon put a tube down his throat to help him breath, keeps his lungs up and his words in. His mouth is empty, and his mind is empty now too, no presence or whisper left behind his eyes to keep her company in the vast quiet of her brother's domain. The clean black and white lines have been blurred and weakened by Simon's drugs, human morality itself, and River hears—feels—nothing but the lukewarm wash of deep grey in response to her seeking mind.
She strokes his hair line, slick with sweat and oil and tiny bits of blood Simon couldn't remove. "Poor Jayne." She whispers softly, the backs of her fingers brushing the rough line of his jaw. The smell of gunpowder cowards beneath the scent of her Jayne, settles in her lungs with Serenity, "She is alright, Big Man. She did not stay but she is alright…" She circles the shell of his ear and Serenity is packed dirt beneath her bare feet and she focuses on the sound of his pulse within her own bloodstream and not the wheeze-beep of his breathing.
"Daddy thinks he did wrong. Thinks he is a silly hun dan who should have held his ground. But he has a secret." She leaned over him, mouth close to his ear, keeping the captain's secret safe from the blue walls and pale lights, "he is proud of you."
Her hand ghosts the trail of his arm, mindful of wires and drips. Simon keeps his patients neat and tidy; she'll not go and meddle in that.
"It's going to rain." She tells him, in a half whisper that might curl into a smile, "The water will make him better. Settle the dirt and the gun-smoke. It will fill their veins." She kisses the rough texture of his chin, his eyebrow, his temple. "He will get better, because she needs you to get better." His hand is a bloody mess within her own hand, brown skin rough that lies uneven with scabs and scars. They smell of disinfectant and other men's blood.
"The rain is coming Jayne. You must wake and count it with me."
He remains still and the grey is a steady silence that does not echo in her ears, leaving more room for the machines and her own heartbeat. She rocks back then, and Serenity turns in half circles beneath her soles. The hospital lights dip and dim and scatter like a hundred stars in the corners of her eyes and the shadows move out to swallow them whole.
His hand is solid within hers and her fingers tighten. She waits.
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End
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Happy Holidays Everyone!
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